Oxymoron
There are 30 journal papers that describe Natural Selection as an oxymoron notes http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oxymoron#Terms_falsely_called_oxymorons_for_rhetorical_effect Ray Martinez http://newsgroups.derkeiler.com/Archive/Talk/talk.origins/2011-10/msg02062.html Ray Martinez states that under the rubric of ns we have a list of truisms asserted to be a mechanism. Jerry Fodor makes a similar case. I make the same point in the main Tautology article namely that claims of logic are invoked as a mechanism because the universal mechanism - Life1 that spawns us into existence can't be defined under materialism. https://groups.google.com/forum/?fromgroups#!msg/talk.origins/vKnp2x_U1NU/afrzXdUnfgkJ Rolf: No, you don't have a clear image of natural selection because you don't *want* it to exist. Ray replies: I understand natural selection to be nonsense and illogic, so yes, it is true, I don't want nonsense and illogic to be true. Taking your two posts together you are you saying either: 1) That a truism is nonsense 2) That it is a logical fallacy to invoke claims of logic as a mechanism where the expectation for a falsifiable physics equation. The most reasonable inference would be 2). Furthermore you mean to say that the concept of invoking truisms as mechanism which are *symbolically* represented with the contracted shorthand natural selection is a fallacy. Now my point is this: There is nothing in the *dictionary* definition of the terms 'natural' and 'selection' that even remotely indicates your and my mutually agreed *interpretation* of *''sentences''* containing the term ns. Hence the meaning we derive from a sentence is context dependent. Natural selection as oxymoronic stand-alone term, can be no more a fallacy than the stand alone Pleonasm terms 'black darkness' or 'free gift' are , because only *sentences can be fallacies, tautologies or illogical''. Is the contention that "free gift2" is a tautologytrue? . To assert that such a phrase always says the same thing twice is to miss-frame the particular premise of a user. For example: A man's gift of a dinner and a movie to his date may be a "gift2" but it sometimes comes bundled with expectations. But, if the recipient of the free dinner asks first "if I go with you, are you expecting anything?" and gets the answer "no", then it's accurate to say the invitee got a "free gift" of dinner. It is incorrect that no gift can ever have non-free implications attached to it, therefore the term free-gift is a Pleonasm and not a tautology: only sentences can be tautologies. A tautology explains everything under all conditions,from the man providing a 'free-gift' it is clear that the same sentence could in another context imply non-reciprocating behavior from the person receiving the gift. Thus the sentence doesn't explain everything in all contexts. By analogy take the sentence 'you have a green light' from Pragmatics: depending on the premise it could mean anything, it doesn't explain everything in all contexts. In fact devoid of a human premise or intent it explains @nothing@. Contradictions like oxymorons explain nothing. Oxymorons have the sense of explaining nothing because they have the sense of being contradictory. Pleonasm has the sense of explaining everything because in the majority of sentences they are used in, the sentence explains everything under all conditions(tautological). Only the premise by the human formulator of a sentence can be definitely asserted(no "sense") to be either all explaining or contradictory. But because only sentences - meaning the premise behind the sentence - can be either contradictions(explains nothing) or tautologies(explain everything) , it has lead people to erroneously view pleonasms as tautologies. Therefore an oxymoron isn't a contradiction because only the premise symbolically represented with a sentence can be a contradiction: it(oxymoron) has the sense of being a contradiction. Finally: * Pleonasms have the sense of being tautologies but are not because only a human premise can be all explanatory. * Oxymorons have the sense of being contradictions but are not because only a human premise can be a contradiction. Reference: See http://tautology.wikia.com/wiki/Premise Category:Natural selection Category:Ray Martinez